Taliban Bans Live Broadcasts of Political Programs on Domestic Media

On Saturday, Adams warned on social media platform X that if the United States does not take necessary action immediately, "an American will be executed by al-Qaeda”.

"This will happen while our government is turning a blind eye," he added.

Mahmood Shah Habibi was arrested in August 2022 along with 29 other employees of Asia Consultancy Group. Habibi was the head of the former Afghan government's Civil Aviation Authority when he was arrested a day after the former al-Qaeda leader was killed in Sherpur, Kabul.

The Taliban have accused the company of helping the US government target Ayman al-Zawahiri. However, the group has not yet confirmed Habibi's arrest.

Earlier, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said that he had discussed the prisoner exchange with US representatives.

Mujahid announced the release of Mohajer-ul-Afghani, a Taliban prisoner in Guantanamo, as one of the conditions for the release of detained US citizens from the group's prisons.

Two years after Mahmood Shah Habibi, an Afghan-born American citizen, was detained by the Taliban, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation announced last month that it had no information about him.

Now, the former CIA agent says that the Taliban "lied" to the US government about Habibi's arrest and his support for al-Qaeda.

Criticising the US cooperation with the Taliban in the fight against terrorism, Sarah Adams said, "Our government also considers the Taliban to be a counter-terrorism ally in Afghanistan."

In September this year, the deputy director of the US Central Intelligence Agency said the CIA had maintained contact with the Taliban in various ways over the past three years. "We have been in contact with them [the Taliban] in various ways all this time, as they have made efforts to fight al-Qaeda and ISIS-K," he added.

David Cohen also claimed that "terrible predictions" about Afghanistan becoming a platform for terrorist attacks around the world have been "wrong”.

"The United States has made it clear that any meaningful steps to normalise relations with the Taliban will depend on the group's actions, including the treatment of women and girls," she added.

The US ambassador wrote about this on her X social media platform handle on Friday.
"We think more is needed to hold [the Taliban] accountable and force them to change," she had told Afghanistan International yesterday.

Greenfield stressed that the Taliban cannot continue to live in a world that marginalises women from society and prevents half of the population from contributing to Afghanistan's development.

Conditions for women and girls in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan have deteriorated exponentially, she said.

Khwaja Mohammad Asif and Yusuf Sharifzoda said that the situation in Afghanistan directly affects the security of the region.

The details of the conversation have not been announced.

However, Tajikistan's state-run Eastern News Agency reported on Friday that a wide range of issues in Tajikistan-Pakistan relations were discussed, especially in the security and military sectors.

According to the report, Pakistan appreciated Tajikistan's efforts to promote peace and stability in Central Asia.

Tajikistan and Pakistan, which share a border with Afghanistan, have repeatedly expressed concern about terrorist threats from Afghanistan in the past three years.

Pakistani officials have repeatedly said that the TTP has a safe haven in Afghanistan and organises its attacks inside Pakistan from Afghan soil.

Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, spokesperson for Pakistan's Foreign Ministry, had said at a press conference in Islamabad that international reports show that the activities of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other terrorist groups continue in Afghanistan.

Tajik President Emomali Rahmon had also warned that Afghanistan, especially in the northern provinces, had become a breeding ground for international terrorism.

Over the past three years, the Taliban has imposed "Sharia" in Afghanistan and eliminated poppy cultivation and drug trafficking, he claimed.

Mansour is the deputy minister of Guidance, Hajj and Religious Affairs, who headed a delegation to Tehran at the invitation of the Islamic Republic.

He did not get up during the opening ceremony of the conference on Thursday in honour of the national anthem of the Islamic Republic. Officials of the Islamic Republic strongly criticised the behaviour of the Taliban representative, calling it disrespectful.

Iran's Foreign Ministry has also summoned the Taliban's senior diplomat in Tehran.
The Taliban representative apologised for his behaviour and on the second day of the conference, like other members of the conference, he stood up in honour of the national anthem of the Islamic Republic.

The Taliban's Ministry of Hajj and Religious Affairs wrote in a statement that Mansour delivered a speech on Friday on the second day of the World Islamic Unity Conference.

He said that the unity of the Islamic community is a religious duty and neglecting it is a sin.

As per the executive editor of Afghanistan International Television (AITV), Iran’s assistance helped the Taliban leaders acquire orbital jammers for the satellite stations of the and shut down broadcast for more than a week.

Harun Najafizada told the media outlet that Taliban officials reportedly sent disruptive signals from a ground station within Afghanistan to the satellite, interfering with its broadcast.

Hundreds of people in Afghanistan saw a blank screen from September 5 to September 13 before the channel shifted to a different satellite frequency.

The channel is popular among Afghans for their critical coverage of the country’s hardline Islamist regime. AITV has consistently reported on the Taliban brutalities on Afghan women, minorities and widespread shutdown of humanitarian work and have also not followed Taliban’s orders of having no female anchors or women appearing on TV with their faces covered.

“I had received information in August from inside Kabul that the Taliban had purchased an extremely expensive jammer with the intention of using it against us,” Najafizada, who operates the channel from London, UK, said.

Other sources who spoke to the British media outlet on the condition of anonymity claimed that the Iranian orbital jammers were obtained earlier this year around May and the expensive purchase was confirmed from inside Kabul’s General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), the intelligence agency of the Taliban.

As per the report, this is not the first time Iran has been accused of interfering with press freedom in central Asia. During the protests against the morality police following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman who died in custody, AITV’s sister channel Iran International also experienced satellite jamming from a ground station in Karaj near Tehran. This impacted the Iranian news channel’s frequencies on Eutelsat and Arabsat satellites. Iran allegedly jammed and disrupted the broadcast services in 2022 during the civil protests caused by Amini’s death.

The report stated that Najafizada said that the act of orbital jamming not only attacks press freedom but also violates international standards and highlights the Taliban’s increasing efforts to dismantle free expression and restrict Afghan citizens’ access to truthful information.